Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/211

Rh much as their praise is now. In estimating his character we ought to remember this fact, for few men do more than their office demands of them, or more than public opinion can approve.

Such was the success of General Taylor in war, at the head of a few thousand men, that public attention was turned towards him, and in a few months the obscure frontier soldier was the most prominent man in the nation. In 1848 he received the nomination of the Whig Convention at Philadelphia for President, and in due time was elected.

His election was certainly one of the most remarkable that ever took place in America. It is worth while to look at it for a moment. There was nothing very remarkable in the man to entitle him to that eminent distinction; if there were, the nation was very slow in finding it out. He was a farmer till about twenty-four years old; then a common Lieutenant four years more. In the next twenty years he got no higher than to the rank of a "Frontier Colonel;" he attained that dignity, in fact, at the age of forty-eight. He was not made General till the fifty-fifth year of his age. But for the Mexican war, I suppose he would, at this day, be as obscure as any other General in the United States' army; nobody would think he was the "Second Washington," "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen," as his creatures have declared. Other military men have been chosen to the presidency. But Washington was much more than a soldier; in "a time that tried men's souls" to the utmost, he had carried the nation through eight years of most perilous warfare, more by his character than any eminent military skill, and so had become endeared to the hearts of the people as no American had ever been before. General Jackson, at first educated as a lawyer, was a man of large talents, distinguished as a Governor, as a Senator, and as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, before he was elected President, or nominated for that office. General Harrison, a man of small abilities, surely not more than a third-rate politician in Ohio, was yet familiar with the routine of political affairs. He had been a member of the Legislature of Ohio, of both branches of the Congress of the United States, and Minister to Colombia. General